MARK FRANKLAND

I wear two hats when I write this blog of mine. First and foremost, I manage a small charity in a small Scottish town called Dumfries. Ours is a front door that opens onto the darker corners of the crumbling world that is Britain 2015. We hand out 5000 emergency food parcels a year in a town that is home to 50,000 souls. Then, as you can see from all of the book covers above, I am also a thriller writer. If you enjoy the blog, you might just enjoy the books. The link below takes you to the whole library in the Kindle store. They can be had for a couple of quid each.

CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT MY BOOKS ON KINDLE

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

MPENE'S STORY

A little while back my Goddaughter Carmen turned 18 and
joined the world of adults. This meant I had one of those ‘what the hell do I get her
for a present’ dilemmas. It wasn’t easy on several fronts. First up was the
usual issue of being flat broke. I’m always flat broke. But if you chose to
write and work for a charity, what can you expect? Most of the time being flat
broke isn’t a particular problem, but every now and then having a quid or two in
the bank can be pretty handy. My Goddaughter’s eighteenth was certainly one of
those moments.

So. What to do and what to get?

It didn’t take all that long for the idea of writing her a
story to emerge. This is one of the very few upsides of being an author. Words
are cheap. In fact, once you have shelled out for a laptop and a copy of
Microsoft Word, words are free of charge. As many as you like, free at the
point of delivery. Thank Christ. Maybe at this very moment George Osborne is
scheming away in 11 Downing St
– if only he could tax words at 5p a pop then the deficit problem would go away
very quickly!

Lots of free of charge words and as many stories as my
fading brain could come up with. But what story? There was the big question.
What tale should a washed up man of fifty come up with to welcome his 18 year
old Goddaughter into the world voting and pubs? Well. Voting at least. Carmen
was no stranger to pubs.

Leads out, coat on and dogs summoned. Time to tramp about
the Scottish countryside with plugged in headphones. Buzzards up in the sky,
jagged hills on the horizon and Bowie
and Joe Strummer in the ears. I find that if I try and force a story it tends
to stay elusive. For me it is better to allow something to jump out from behind
a bush. I would like to think that Mpene showed herself whilst Peter Gabriel
lamented the loss of Steve Biko in Police Room 619, Port Elizabeth in September 1977. And maybe
that indeed was the case, but to be honest I don’t remember.

All of a sudden I remembered standing out in the burning
African sun by the lazy waters of the Gambia River.
It was the early 90’s and we had lucked out on a hyper discounted week long
trip to West Africa. The hotel was supposed to
be a kind of Package Holiday Green Zone and punters were encouraged to only
risk taking a peek at Darkest Africa via excursions on air conditioned coaches.
That didn’t remotely ring our bell so we got a taxi into Banjul and managed to
hire ourselves an old 4x4 that wouldn’t have passed an MOT at home in a million
years. One day we found ourselves on a stretch of roadside at the place where
the brown waters of the River Gambia met the crashing white breakers of the Atlantic. The lads jumped down and started messing about
at the river’s edge. Dyonne was 7 and Courtney was 2 - just about learning the
ropes of the whole walking thing. I have memories of high white clouds chasing
across a rich blue sky. The breeze was rustling the reeds at the river’s edge
and long legged birds waited for fish,

In many ways the River Gambia says everything about how we
once went about our business in the days when we had our Empire. The river cuts
a gash into Africa and you can sail a gunboat
down the middle for fifty miles or so. The guys who had the job of pegging out
the new claim for Britain
did their job with care. They worked out how far they could sail down the
river. Then they worked how far a gunboat to could fire a shell. The range of
the guns governed how much territory could be controlled by the good old boys
of the Royal Navy. So when you check out Gambia on a map, you will find that
it is an odd sliver of a country whose territory runs ten miles or so either
side of the river.

What we wanted was a nice secure port area to develop. A gateway for shipping out all the stuff we planned to nick from
the interior. And then I spotted a wreck of a building out on an island in the
middle of the river. It was hard to see at first glance. Then little by little
it revealed itself. Old, ruined white walls that once upon a time must have
been the local bonded warehouse of the British Empire.
And what was the main commodity that we moved through those non descript white
walls? What goods were we able to trade for glass beads and bottles of rum?

Black Gold. Human beings. Slaves.

Twenty million of them.

Men and women and children, carefully chosen for their
potential to work the new sugar plantations of the West
Indies. Strong enough to put in a fifteen hour shift and take a
good lashing. Available for sale at knock down prices from hard faced Arab
traders with coal black eyes.

Before Britain
got itself into the slavery business, we weren’t much of an outfit. We were an
inconsequential backwater of an island where it always seemed to rain. Every
now and then we tried our luck and invaded France; sometimes we won, sometime
we got our arses kicked. We were pretty good at piracy and not a lot else. Then
we sussed out how to buy people cheap and sell them for top dollar. And we hit
the big time. Within a couple of hundred years of getting into the African
Slave Trade we had become Big Time Charlies and we were able to punch a long way
above our weight on the world stage. We invested our slave profits well and
the trainloads of cash we made from punting Black Gold financed the Industrial
Revolution and the biggest navy in the world. In the end the slave money set us
on a road that ended with the Union Jack flying over a third of the planet. Not
bad for a two bit island off the coast of Europe.

As I squinted through the bright afternoon sunshine, a
realisation hit me like a bucket of ice water down the back of the neck.

It hit me as I watched my two sons playing at the river’s
edge.

It hit me as my statuesque partner Carol stood a few yards
away gazing out to the far end of the Atlantic Ocean.

The realisation?

A little personal background is required here.

I am what the Government these days refers to as White
British. And Carol is Black British. Afro-Caribbean Black British. ‘Afro’ as in
once upon a time her ancestors lived in an African village until a bunch of
heavily armed Arabs turned up one day and stole all the fittest and killed the
rest. ‘Caribbean’ as in those same Arab traders marched her ancestors to the
coast and traded them to my ancestors to ship across the Atlantic to Barbados. And
my boys? Mixed Race Black and White British. ‘Muts’ as President Obama once put
it with his trade mark grin.

The ice water down the back of the neck was the realisation
that there was every chance that many hundreds of years earlier relatives of
Carol and Dyonne and Courtney had passed through the white fort on the island
in the middle of the river. By the time they were purchased and frog marched
through the gates of the fort, they would have been about half way through
their journey from hell. They would have already walked hundreds of miles
through the heat and dust and already half of those who set out on the journey
would have been dead; mere piles of white bones, all picked clean by the
vultures.

Ahead of them lay an even worse journey. Weeks and weeks,
chained and packed into the hold of a slave ship where disease would rack their
bodies and many more would die. The survivors would be washed down and sold on
to the plantation owners to be worked to death in the fields of sugar cane. In
the 18th Century, the life expectancy of an African slave getting off
the boat in Barbados
was less than that of a Jew getting of the train at Auschwitz Birkenau in 1942.
No wonder we do all we can to bury that particular part of our history.

I tried to get my head around how strong the ones who
managed survive must have been. Their levels of physical strength must have been
beyond awesome. No wonder their ancestors clean up on the sportsfields of the
21st Century. Their mental strength must have been beyond awesome.
How on earth did they find the fortitude to carry on against such impossible
odds? What wells of resolve did they tap into? And I suddenly felt a chill in
the bones, despite the heat of the African sun. As I watched my two sons playing
at the water’s edge I saw for the first time that they owed their lives
entirely to the dogged, stubborn, heroic refusal to give up shown by an
ancestor all those years before.

So it was that the memory of that realisation by the waters
of the Gambia River came back to me as I
tramped along country roads with blackthorn hedges and dry stone walls.

Like Dyonne and Courtney, my goddaughter Carmen also owes
her time on the planet to long forgotten ancestors who found a way to live
through the bottomless hell of the Middle Passage and the killing fields of
sugar cane.

And with a smile, I realised that their legacy was not hard spot
in my goddaughter. Words to paint a picture of Carmen? 'Stubborn', 'wilful',
'stroppy', a force of nature when ‘off on one’. Now where had all that come from?
Surely these traits of her character had been passed all the way down the
ancestral line from some young women stolen from her home and delivered into a
hell on earth.

And surviving it.

Overcoming it.

Beating the odds and becoming a mother herself and ensuring
that the line that joins Africa to Barbados
to Britain
was able to stretch across the years.

So it was the story formed very quickly in my mind. The
connection between my goddaughter and her long forgotten ancestor. A debt of
life.

And by the time I arrived back home I had decided on a name
for my Goddaughter’s ancestor.

Mpene.

It isn’t a long story. You will probably have it read in an
hour or so. It is available to one and all for the princely sum of 99p.
Thankfully Carmen likes it and she hasn’t disowned me for describing her as
‘wilful, stubborn and stroppy’ in the book description on the Kindle Store. I
hope the memory of Mpene helps her to fulfil her huge potential.